Data-mining techniques have been developed to turn data into useful task-oriented knowledge. Most algorithms for mining association rules identify relationships among transactions using binary values and find rules at...Data-mining techniques have been developed to turn data into useful task-oriented knowledge. Most algorithms for mining association rules identify relationships among transactions using binary values and find rules at a single-concept level. Extracting multilevel association rules in transaction databases is most commonly used in data mining. This paper proposes a multilevel fuzzy association rule mining model for extraction of implicit knowledge which stored as quantitative values in transactions. For this reason it uses different support value at each level as well as different membership function for each item. By integrating fuzzy-set concepts, data-mining technologies and multiple-level taxonomy, our method finds fuzzy association rules from transaction data sets. This approach adopts a top-down progressively deepening approach to derive large itemsets and also incorporates fuzzy boundaries instead of sharp boundary intervals. Comparing our method with previous ones in simulation shows that the proposed method maintains higher precision, the mined rules are closer to reality, and it gives ability to mine association rules at different levels based on the user’s tendency as well.展开更多
Hotspots (active fires) indicate spatial distribution of fires. A study on determining influence factors for hotspot occurrence is essential so that fire events can be predicted based on characteristics of a certain a...Hotspots (active fires) indicate spatial distribution of fires. A study on determining influence factors for hotspot occurrence is essential so that fire events can be predicted based on characteristics of a certain area. This study discovers the possible influence factors on the occurrence of fire events using the association rule algorithm namely Apriori in the study area of Rokan Hilir Riau Province Indonesia. The Apriori algorithm was applied on a forest fire dataset which containeddata on physical environment (land cover, river, road and city center), socio-economic (income source, population, and number of school), weather (precipitation, wind speed, and screen temperature), and peatlands. The experiment results revealed 324 multidimensional association rules indicating relationships between hotspots occurrence and other factors.The association among hotspots occurrence with other geographical objects was discovered for the minimum support of 10% and the minimum confidence of 80%. The results show that strong relations between hotspots occurrence and influence factors are found for the support about 12.42%, the confidence of 1, and the lift of 2.26. These factors are precipitation greater than or equal to 3 mm/day, wind speed in [1m/s, 2m/s), non peatland area, screen temperature in [297K, 298K), the number of school in 1 km2 less than or equal to 0.1, and the distance of each hotspot to the nearest road less than or equal to 2.5 km.展开更多
Maximum frequent pattern generation from a large database of transactions and items for association rule mining is an important research topic in data mining. Association rule mining aims to discover interesting corre...Maximum frequent pattern generation from a large database of transactions and items for association rule mining is an important research topic in data mining. Association rule mining aims to discover interesting correlations, frequent patterns, associations, or causal structures between items hidden in a large database. By exploiting quantum computing, we propose an efficient quantum search algorithm design to discover the maximum frequent patterns. We modified Grover’s search algorithm so that a subspace of arbitrary symmetric states is used instead of the whole search space. We presented a novel quantum oracle design that employs a quantum counter to count the maximum frequent items and a quantum comparator to check with a minimum support threshold. The proposed derived algorithm increases the rate of the correct solutions since the search is only in a subspace. Furthermore, our algorithm significantly scales and optimizes the required number of qubits in design, which directly reflected positively on the performance. Our proposed design can accommodate more transactions and items and still have a good performance with a small number of qubits.展开更多
The conventional complete association rule set was replaced by the least association rule set in data warehouse association rule mining process. The least association rule set should comply with two requirements: 1) i...The conventional complete association rule set was replaced by the least association rule set in data warehouse association rule mining process. The least association rule set should comply with two requirements: 1) it should be the minimal and the simplest association rule set; 2) its predictive power should in no way be weaker than that of the complete association rule set so that the precision of the association rule set analysis can be guaranteed. By adopting the least association rule set, the pruning of weak rules can be effectively carried out so as to greatly reduce the number of frequent itemset, and therefore improve the mining efficiency. Finally, based on the classical Apriori algorithm, the upward closure property of weak rules is utilized to develop a corresponding efficient algorithm.展开更多
The traditional generalization-based knowledge discovery method is introduced. A new kind of multilevel spatial association of the rules mining method based on the cloud model is presented. The cloud model integrates ...The traditional generalization-based knowledge discovery method is introduced. A new kind of multilevel spatial association of the rules mining method based on the cloud model is presented. The cloud model integrates the vague and random use of linguistic terms in a unified way. With these models, spatial and nonspatial attribute values are well generalized at multiple levels, allowing discovery of strong spatial association rules. Combining the cloud model based method with Apriori algorithms for mining association rules from a spatial database shows benefits in being effective and flexible.展开更多
Association rule mining methods, as a set of important data mining tools, could be used for mining spatial association rules of spatial data. However, applications of these methods are limited for mining results conta...Association rule mining methods, as a set of important data mining tools, could be used for mining spatial association rules of spatial data. However, applications of these methods are limited for mining results containing large number of redundant rules. In this paper, a new method named Geo-Filtered Association Rules Mining(GFARM) is proposed to effectively eliminate the redundant rules. An application of GFARM is performed as a case study in which association rules are discovered between building land distribution and potential driving factors in Wuhan, China from 1995 to 2015. Ten sets of regular sampling grids with different sizes are used for detecting the influence of multi-scales on GFARM. Results show that the proposed method can filter 50%–70% of redundant rules. GFARM is also successful in discovering spatial association pattern between building land distribution and driving factors.展开更多
The Apriori algorithm is a classical method of association rules mining.Based on analysis of this theory,the paper provides an improved Apriori algorithm.The paper puts foward with algorithm combines HASH table techni...The Apriori algorithm is a classical method of association rules mining.Based on analysis of this theory,the paper provides an improved Apriori algorithm.The paper puts foward with algorithm combines HASH table technique and reduction of candidate item sets to enhance the usage efficiency of resources as well as the individualized service of the data library.展开更多
Typical association rules consider only items enumerated in transactions. Such rules are referred to as positive association rules. Negative association rules also consider the same items, but in addition consider neg...Typical association rules consider only items enumerated in transactions. Such rules are referred to as positive association rules. Negative association rules also consider the same items, but in addition consider negated items (i. e. absent from transactions). Negative association rules are useful in market-basket analysis to identify products that conflict with each other or products that complement each other. They are also very convenient for associative classifiers, classifiers that build their classification model based on association rules. Indeed, mining for such rules necessitates the examination of an exponentially large search space. Despite their usefulness, very few algorithms to mine them have been proposed to date. In this paper, an algorithm based on FP tree is presented to discover negative association rules.展开更多
In this letter, on the basis of Frequent Pattern(FP) tree, the support function to update FP-tree is introduced, then an Incremental FP (IFP) algorithm for mining association rules is proposed. IFP algorithm considers...In this letter, on the basis of Frequent Pattern(FP) tree, the support function to update FP-tree is introduced, then an Incremental FP (IFP) algorithm for mining association rules is proposed. IFP algorithm considers not only adding new data into the database but also reducing old data from the database. Furthermore, it can predigest five cases to three cases.The algorithm proposed in this letter can avoid generating lots of candidate items, and it is high efficient.展开更多
Data mining techniques offer great opportunities for developing ethics lines whose main aim is to ensure improvements and compliance with the values, conduct and commitments making up the code of ethics. The aim of th...Data mining techniques offer great opportunities for developing ethics lines whose main aim is to ensure improvements and compliance with the values, conduct and commitments making up the code of ethics. The aim of this study is to suggest a process for exploiting the data generated by the data generated and collected from an ethics line by extracting rules of association and applying the Apriori algorithm. This makes it possible to identify anomalies and behaviour patterns requiring action to review, correct, promote or expand them, as appropriate.展开更多
In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm, called FFP-Growth (shortfor fast FP-Growth) , to mine frequent itemsets. Similar to FP-Growth, FFP-Growth searches theFP-tree in the bottom-up order, but need not cons...In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm, called FFP-Growth (shortfor fast FP-Growth) , to mine frequent itemsets. Similar to FP-Growth, FFP-Growth searches theFP-tree in the bottom-up order, but need not construct conditional pattern bases and sub-FP-trees,thus, saving a substantial amount of time and space, and the FP-tree created by it is much smallerthan that created by TD-FP-Growth, hence improving efficiency. At the same time, FFP-Growth can beeasily extended for reducing the search space as TD-FP-Growth (M) and TD-FP-Growth (C). Experimentalresults show that the algorithm of this paper is effective and efficient.展开更多
In data mining from transaction DB, the relationships between the attributes have been focused, but the relationships between the tuples have not been taken into account. In spatial database, there are relationships b...In data mining from transaction DB, the relationships between the attributes have been focused, but the relationships between the tuples have not been taken into account. In spatial database, there are relationships between the attributes and the tuples, and most of the associations occur between the tuples, such as adjacent, intersection, overlap and other topological relationships. So the tasks of spatial data association rules mining include mining the relationships between attributes of spatial objects, which are called as vertical direction DM, and the relationships between the tuples, which are called as horizontal direction DM. This paper analyzes the storage models of spatial data, uses for reference the technologies of data mining in transaction DB, defines the spatial data association rule, including vertical direction association rule, horizontal direction association rule and two-direction association rule, discusses the measurement of spatial association rule interestingness, and puts forward the work flows of spatial association rule data mining. During two-direction spatial association rules mining, an algorithm is proposed to get non-spatial itemsets. By virtue of spatial analysis, the spatial relations were transferred into non-spatial associations and the non-spatial itemsets were gotten. Based on the non-spatial itemsets, the Apriori algorithm or other algorithms could be used to get the frequent itemsets and then the spatial association rules come into being. Using spatial DB, the spatial association rules were gotten to validate the algorithm, and the test results show that this algorithm is efficient and can mine the interesting spatial rules.展开更多
As data mining more and more popular applied in computer system,the quality as-surance test of its software would be get more and more attention.However,because of the ex-istence of the 'oracle' problem,the tr...As data mining more and more popular applied in computer system,the quality as-surance test of its software would be get more and more attention.However,because of the ex-istence of the 'oracle' problem,the traditional test method is not ease fit for the application program in the field of the data mining.In this paper,based on metamorphic testing,a software testing method is proposed in the field of the data mining,makes an association rules algorithm as the specific case,and constructs the metamorphic relation on the algorithm.Experiences show that the method can achieve the testing target and is feasible to apply to other domain.展开更多
HA (hashing array), a new algorithm, for mining frequent itemsets of large database is proposed. It employs a structure hash array, ltemArray ( ) to store the information of database and then uses it instead of da...HA (hashing array), a new algorithm, for mining frequent itemsets of large database is proposed. It employs a structure hash array, ltemArray ( ) to store the information of database and then uses it instead of database in later iteration. By this improvement, only twice scanning of the whole database is necessary, thereby the computational cost can be reduced significantly. To overcome the performance bottleneck of frequent 2-itemsets mining, a modified algorithm of HA, DHA (directaddressing hashing and array) is proposed, which combines HA with direct-addressing hashing technique. The new hybrid algorithm, DHA, not only overcomes the performance bottleneck but also inherits the advantages of HA. Extensive simulations are conducted in this paper to evaluate the performance of the proposed new algorithm, and the results prove the new algorithm is more efficient and reasonable.展开更多
Extracting objects from legacy systems is a basic step in system's object orientation to improve the maintainability and understandability of the systems. A new object extraction model using association rules and...Extracting objects from legacy systems is a basic step in system's object orientation to improve the maintainability and understandability of the systems. A new object extraction model using association rules and dependence analysis is proposed. In this model data are classified by association rules and the corresponding operations are partitioned by dependence analysis.展开更多
Association rule mining is an important issue in data mining. The paper proposed an binary system based method to generate candidate frequent itemsets and corresponding supporting counts efficiently, which needs only ...Association rule mining is an important issue in data mining. The paper proposed an binary system based method to generate candidate frequent itemsets and corresponding supporting counts efficiently, which needs only some operations such as "and", "or" and "xor". Applying this idea in the existed distributed association rule mining al gorithm FDM, the improved algorithm BFDM is proposed. The theoretical analysis and experiment testify that BFDM is effective and efficient.展开更多
The amount of data for decision making has increased tremendously in the age of the digital economy. Decision makers who fail to proficiently manipulate the data produced may make incorrect decisions and therefore har...The amount of data for decision making has increased tremendously in the age of the digital economy. Decision makers who fail to proficiently manipulate the data produced may make incorrect decisions and therefore harm their business. Thus, the task of extracting and classifying the useful information efficiently and effectively from huge amounts of computational data is of special importance. In this paper, we consider that the attributes of data could be both crisp and fuzzy. By examining the suitable partial data, segments with different classes are formed, then a multithreaded computation is performed to generate crisp rules (if possible), and finally, the fuzzy partition technique is employed to deal with the fuzzy attributes for classification. The rules generated in classifying the overall data can be used to gain more knowledge from the data collected.展开更多
These days, health care systems such as pharmacies and drugstores normally produce high volumes of data. Consequently, utilizing data mining methods in health care systems has become a conventional process. In this re...These days, health care systems such as pharmacies and drugstores normally produce high volumes of data. Consequently, utilizing data mining methods in health care systems has become a conventional process. In this research, Apriori algorithm has been applied to perform data mining using the data obtained from the prescriptions ordered within a pharmacy. Ten association rules were achieved from the assigned pharmaceutical drugs in those prescriptions using the aforementioned Apriori algorithm. The accuracy of these rules is also manually studied and reviewed by a physician. Among these association rules, Vitamin D and Calcium pills are the most interrelated medications, and Omeprazole and Metronidazole rankd second in terms of association. The results of this study provide useful feedback information about associations among drugs.展开更多
文摘Data-mining techniques have been developed to turn data into useful task-oriented knowledge. Most algorithms for mining association rules identify relationships among transactions using binary values and find rules at a single-concept level. Extracting multilevel association rules in transaction databases is most commonly used in data mining. This paper proposes a multilevel fuzzy association rule mining model for extraction of implicit knowledge which stored as quantitative values in transactions. For this reason it uses different support value at each level as well as different membership function for each item. By integrating fuzzy-set concepts, data-mining technologies and multiple-level taxonomy, our method finds fuzzy association rules from transaction data sets. This approach adopts a top-down progressively deepening approach to derive large itemsets and also incorporates fuzzy boundaries instead of sharp boundary intervals. Comparing our method with previous ones in simulation shows that the proposed method maintains higher precision, the mined rules are closer to reality, and it gives ability to mine association rules at different levels based on the user’s tendency as well.
文摘Hotspots (active fires) indicate spatial distribution of fires. A study on determining influence factors for hotspot occurrence is essential so that fire events can be predicted based on characteristics of a certain area. This study discovers the possible influence factors on the occurrence of fire events using the association rule algorithm namely Apriori in the study area of Rokan Hilir Riau Province Indonesia. The Apriori algorithm was applied on a forest fire dataset which containeddata on physical environment (land cover, river, road and city center), socio-economic (income source, population, and number of school), weather (precipitation, wind speed, and screen temperature), and peatlands. The experiment results revealed 324 multidimensional association rules indicating relationships between hotspots occurrence and other factors.The association among hotspots occurrence with other geographical objects was discovered for the minimum support of 10% and the minimum confidence of 80%. The results show that strong relations between hotspots occurrence and influence factors are found for the support about 12.42%, the confidence of 1, and the lift of 2.26. These factors are precipitation greater than or equal to 3 mm/day, wind speed in [1m/s, 2m/s), non peatland area, screen temperature in [297K, 298K), the number of school in 1 km2 less than or equal to 0.1, and the distance of each hotspot to the nearest road less than or equal to 2.5 km.
文摘Maximum frequent pattern generation from a large database of transactions and items for association rule mining is an important research topic in data mining. Association rule mining aims to discover interesting correlations, frequent patterns, associations, or causal structures between items hidden in a large database. By exploiting quantum computing, we propose an efficient quantum search algorithm design to discover the maximum frequent patterns. We modified Grover’s search algorithm so that a subspace of arbitrary symmetric states is used instead of the whole search space. We presented a novel quantum oracle design that employs a quantum counter to count the maximum frequent items and a quantum comparator to check with a minimum support threshold. The proposed derived algorithm increases the rate of the correct solutions since the search is only in a subspace. Furthermore, our algorithm significantly scales and optimizes the required number of qubits in design, which directly reflected positively on the performance. Our proposed design can accommodate more transactions and items and still have a good performance with a small number of qubits.
文摘The conventional complete association rule set was replaced by the least association rule set in data warehouse association rule mining process. The least association rule set should comply with two requirements: 1) it should be the minimal and the simplest association rule set; 2) its predictive power should in no way be weaker than that of the complete association rule set so that the precision of the association rule set analysis can be guaranteed. By adopting the least association rule set, the pruning of weak rules can be effectively carried out so as to greatly reduce the number of frequent itemset, and therefore improve the mining efficiency. Finally, based on the classical Apriori algorithm, the upward closure property of weak rules is utilized to develop a corresponding efficient algorithm.
文摘The traditional generalization-based knowledge discovery method is introduced. A new kind of multilevel spatial association of the rules mining method based on the cloud model is presented. The cloud model integrates the vague and random use of linguistic terms in a unified way. With these models, spatial and nonspatial attribute values are well generalized at multiple levels, allowing discovery of strong spatial association rules. Combining the cloud model based method with Apriori algorithms for mining association rules from a spatial database shows benefits in being effective and flexible.
基金Under the auspices of Special Fund of Ministry of Land and Resources of China in Public Interest(No.201511001)
文摘Association rule mining methods, as a set of important data mining tools, could be used for mining spatial association rules of spatial data. However, applications of these methods are limited for mining results containing large number of redundant rules. In this paper, a new method named Geo-Filtered Association Rules Mining(GFARM) is proposed to effectively eliminate the redundant rules. An application of GFARM is performed as a case study in which association rules are discovered between building land distribution and potential driving factors in Wuhan, China from 1995 to 2015. Ten sets of regular sampling grids with different sizes are used for detecting the influence of multi-scales on GFARM. Results show that the proposed method can filter 50%–70% of redundant rules. GFARM is also successful in discovering spatial association pattern between building land distribution and driving factors.
文摘The Apriori algorithm is a classical method of association rules mining.Based on analysis of this theory,the paper provides an improved Apriori algorithm.The paper puts foward with algorithm combines HASH table technique and reduction of candidate item sets to enhance the usage efficiency of resources as well as the individualized service of the data library.
基金Supported by the National Natural Science Foun-dation of China(70371015) and the Science Foundation of JiangsuUniversity ( 04KJD001)
文摘Typical association rules consider only items enumerated in transactions. Such rules are referred to as positive association rules. Negative association rules also consider the same items, but in addition consider negated items (i. e. absent from transactions). Negative association rules are useful in market-basket analysis to identify products that conflict with each other or products that complement each other. They are also very convenient for associative classifiers, classifiers that build their classification model based on association rules. Indeed, mining for such rules necessitates the examination of an exponentially large search space. Despite their usefulness, very few algorithms to mine them have been proposed to date. In this paper, an algorithm based on FP tree is presented to discover negative association rules.
基金Supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(No.60073012),Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu(BK2001004)
文摘In this letter, on the basis of Frequent Pattern(FP) tree, the support function to update FP-tree is introduced, then an Incremental FP (IFP) algorithm for mining association rules is proposed. IFP algorithm considers not only adding new data into the database but also reducing old data from the database. Furthermore, it can predigest five cases to three cases.The algorithm proposed in this letter can avoid generating lots of candidate items, and it is high efficient.
文摘Data mining techniques offer great opportunities for developing ethics lines whose main aim is to ensure improvements and compliance with the values, conduct and commitments making up the code of ethics. The aim of this study is to suggest a process for exploiting the data generated by the data generated and collected from an ethics line by extracting rules of association and applying the Apriori algorithm. This makes it possible to identify anomalies and behaviour patterns requiring action to review, correct, promote or expand them, as appropriate.
文摘In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm, called FFP-Growth (shortfor fast FP-Growth) , to mine frequent itemsets. Similar to FP-Growth, FFP-Growth searches theFP-tree in the bottom-up order, but need not construct conditional pattern bases and sub-FP-trees,thus, saving a substantial amount of time and space, and the FP-tree created by it is much smallerthan that created by TD-FP-Growth, hence improving efficiency. At the same time, FFP-Growth can beeasily extended for reducing the search space as TD-FP-Growth (M) and TD-FP-Growth (C). Experimentalresults show that the algorithm of this paper is effective and efficient.
基金The work is supported by Natural Science Foundatiion of Chongqing (No .CSTC 2005BB2065)
文摘In data mining from transaction DB, the relationships between the attributes have been focused, but the relationships between the tuples have not been taken into account. In spatial database, there are relationships between the attributes and the tuples, and most of the associations occur between the tuples, such as adjacent, intersection, overlap and other topological relationships. So the tasks of spatial data association rules mining include mining the relationships between attributes of spatial objects, which are called as vertical direction DM, and the relationships between the tuples, which are called as horizontal direction DM. This paper analyzes the storage models of spatial data, uses for reference the technologies of data mining in transaction DB, defines the spatial data association rule, including vertical direction association rule, horizontal direction association rule and two-direction association rule, discusses the measurement of spatial association rule interestingness, and puts forward the work flows of spatial association rule data mining. During two-direction spatial association rules mining, an algorithm is proposed to get non-spatial itemsets. By virtue of spatial analysis, the spatial relations were transferred into non-spatial associations and the non-spatial itemsets were gotten. Based on the non-spatial itemsets, the Apriori algorithm or other algorithms could be used to get the frequent itemsets and then the spatial association rules come into being. Using spatial DB, the spatial association rules were gotten to validate the algorithm, and the test results show that this algorithm is efficient and can mine the interesting spatial rules.
文摘As data mining more and more popular applied in computer system,the quality as-surance test of its software would be get more and more attention.However,because of the ex-istence of the 'oracle' problem,the traditional test method is not ease fit for the application program in the field of the data mining.In this paper,based on metamorphic testing,a software testing method is proposed in the field of the data mining,makes an association rules algorithm as the specific case,and constructs the metamorphic relation on the algorithm.Experiences show that the method can achieve the testing target and is feasible to apply to other domain.
文摘HA (hashing array), a new algorithm, for mining frequent itemsets of large database is proposed. It employs a structure hash array, ltemArray ( ) to store the information of database and then uses it instead of database in later iteration. By this improvement, only twice scanning of the whole database is necessary, thereby the computational cost can be reduced significantly. To overcome the performance bottleneck of frequent 2-itemsets mining, a modified algorithm of HA, DHA (directaddressing hashing and array) is proposed, which combines HA with direct-addressing hashing technique. The new hybrid algorithm, DHA, not only overcomes the performance bottleneck but also inherits the advantages of HA. Extensive simulations are conducted in this paper to evaluate the performance of the proposed new algorithm, and the results prove the new algorithm is more efficient and reasonable.
基金Supported in part by the National Natural Science F oundation of China(6 0 0 730 12 )
文摘Extracting objects from legacy systems is a basic step in system's object orientation to improve the maintainability and understandability of the systems. A new object extraction model using association rules and dependence analysis is proposed. In this model data are classified by association rules and the corresponding operations are partitioned by dependence analysis.
基金Supported by the National Natural Science Foun-dation of China (70371015)
文摘Association rule mining is an important issue in data mining. The paper proposed an binary system based method to generate candidate frequent itemsets and corresponding supporting counts efficiently, which needs only some operations such as "and", "or" and "xor". Applying this idea in the existed distributed association rule mining al gorithm FDM, the improved algorithm BFDM is proposed. The theoretical analysis and experiment testify that BFDM is effective and efficient.
文摘The amount of data for decision making has increased tremendously in the age of the digital economy. Decision makers who fail to proficiently manipulate the data produced may make incorrect decisions and therefore harm their business. Thus, the task of extracting and classifying the useful information efficiently and effectively from huge amounts of computational data is of special importance. In this paper, we consider that the attributes of data could be both crisp and fuzzy. By examining the suitable partial data, segments with different classes are formed, then a multithreaded computation is performed to generate crisp rules (if possible), and finally, the fuzzy partition technique is employed to deal with the fuzzy attributes for classification. The rules generated in classifying the overall data can be used to gain more knowledge from the data collected.
文摘These days, health care systems such as pharmacies and drugstores normally produce high volumes of data. Consequently, utilizing data mining methods in health care systems has become a conventional process. In this research, Apriori algorithm has been applied to perform data mining using the data obtained from the prescriptions ordered within a pharmacy. Ten association rules were achieved from the assigned pharmaceutical drugs in those prescriptions using the aforementioned Apriori algorithm. The accuracy of these rules is also manually studied and reviewed by a physician. Among these association rules, Vitamin D and Calcium pills are the most interrelated medications, and Omeprazole and Metronidazole rankd second in terms of association. The results of this study provide useful feedback information about associations among drugs.